It’s ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ All Over Again

Larry Eustachy must be feeling like Sherman McCoy these days. Eustachy is the men’s basketball coach at Iowa State University. McCoy is the Wall Street “Master of the Universe” in Tom Wolfe‘s masterly “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” One of the novel’s themes deals with how the media can accelerate events to the point that they rapidly spin out of control. That’s the situation Eustachy faces in Ames, Iowa, where he has become “a national spectacle,” according to a story by Mark Siebert in the Des Moines Register about the impact that the Internet and 24/7 media has had on the story.

Eustachy’s downward spiral began when photos posted on a Missouri Tigers message board showed him kissing a coed with a beer in his hand. The story has grown “into a monster tornado,” according to Siebert. Someone that not many people had heard of outside of Iowa is now a national celebrity — if celebrity is the right word. As I told Siebert for his story, it isn’t just the power of the Internet, it isn’t just the speed on the Internet. It’s power-times-speed, which equals velocity. And Eustachy is caught up in that velocity.